Tag Archives: harvard

All the videos and presentations from Global PHAT 2010 have now been posted in the online resources at http://www.globalphat.com. This includes presentations on ICT Failures, Effective EMR, and mHealth Solutions for Community Health Workers by:

Alvin Marcelo, Director, National Telehealth Center, University of the Philippines, Manila

Jessica Haberer, Harvard Initiative for Global Health

In addition, PHAT has partnered with GHDonline.org, an online platform of communities developed by the Global Health Delivery Project, to provide a forum for continuing the dialogue about the topics discussed at the event. I have just posted the content from the session titled Effective EMR: Moving Beyond the Technology, along with discussion questions in the GHDonline.org Health IT Community. You can access the discussion here: What non-technological factors make EMR effective?. If you are not already a member of GHDonline.org, I encourage you to join! It is a fantastic resource for engaging others with similar interests across the globe.

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have the potential to transform health delivery throughout the world, whether through the use of electronic health records to manage HIV/AIDS care in rural Uganda or mobile devices providing community health workers with decision support in the field. Too often, however, this potential is not realized because undue emphasis is placed on the health technology in isolation, not in context.

Global PHAT 2010: Moving Beyond the Technology puts the health technology in context, focusing on human-centered, practical implementation strategies in developing country settings. This one day event brings together health technology implementers to examine the critical factors that make cutting edge technologies successful, including capacity building, partnership development, monitoring and evaluation, workflow and information flow optimization, and cultural contexts.

I am organizing the 2009 Public Health & Technology Conference hosted by the Harvard School of Public Health on Monday, November 16, 2009. See more details and register at our website: www.hsph.harvard.edu/phat. The full announcement is below…

Registration for the 2009 PHAT Conference is now open at www.hsph.harvard.edu/phat! This event will be held at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center on Monday, Nov 16 and focuses on adoption of electronic health records, meaningful use, and patient empowerment. John Halamka, CIO of Boston CareGroup and Chair of the national HITSP Committee, and Adam Bosworth, Founder and CEO of Keas and former VP of Engineering at Google, will be speaking, along with David Cutler (Harvard Professor of Economics), Esther Dyson (23andme), Steve Lohr (NYTimes reporter on health and technology), John Moore (founder and president of Chilmark Research), Ashish Jha (HSPH associate professor of health policy & management), and others. Complete details are available on our website: www.hsph.harvard.edu/phat.

Standard registration is $75. Harvard faculty and staff is $20, and registration for full-time students is only $10. Tickets are limited, so register soon!

Please refer to our website or contact jpayne@hsph.harvard.edu for more information.

Google released Google Flu Trends yesterday, which analyzes search terms for indicators of flu activity. With the onset of flu season, people start searching for keywords such as “flu vaccine” which Google detects and charts. The example below reveals that we are just a couple weeks away from a time of year that has experienced a large outbreak:

The true genius behind this system is that Google is not directly involved in data collection. Data is collected passively as searches are submitted by users. Incredibly, Google Flu Trends reliably performs flu surveillance up to 2 weeks faster than the CDC (US Center for Disease Control)! For details on Google’s tracking method, check out their blog post Tracking Flu Trends.

In a similar fashion, David Bates of Harvard Medical School is creating an epidemic surveillance system that analyzes electronic health records of several Boston-area medical centers every night. When an outbreak is in the works, not all the sick people go to one hospital. 2 might show up at one hospital and 3 at another. The next day several more go. By the time authorities are aware of an outbreak, it is weeks too late. Performing surveillance on data from several hospitals simultaneously greatly expands quantity of information available and can potentially prevent outbreaks from occurring.

Data mining in health that transcends a single unit (like a hospital) has only just begun. Personal health record systems like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault optionally aggregate health data from a variety of sources (e.g. hospitals, clinics, insurers, pharmacies). Determining health trends is one of Google’s primary goals with this system:

Once again, while Google and Microsoft are both investing heavily in platform development and partner recruitment, the data is entered, imported, and managed by the consumer. For an interesting post on the positive and negative ramifications of Google Health, check out Tree of Knowledge.